If you read the spec of DAT on wikk:
Digital Audio Tape ( DAT or R-DAT ) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987.[1] In appearance it is similar to a Compact Cassette, using 3.81 mm / 0.15" (commonly referred to as 4 mm) magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm.
@Markosz
Commonly referred to as 4mm, so 't can be juist 3.8…
Can you measure it with a caliper ?
Plus the lenght of the tape, then you need to know the tape speed.
for example:
The DAT tape is 8.15 mm/s and a DCC 47.6 mm/s that 5,84x
But a DCC has two side to make the tape length, so 5,84/2 = 2,92
So a 90 min DAT is 30min of DCC.
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Thank you Jorn
I have dat player so they can be use for dat recordings one thing I Doon understand whys they call them data tapes ?
Good question. Because DDS 1-5 are industry standards for data archival based on the same tapes as DAT. One person I asked about DCC stated cheaper tapes as the reason for getting a DAT recorder.
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I am the one that has experence with the Analog converting to DCC, so putting a DAT/DATA tape in a Analoge shell and testing is a job that I easy can do and test.
So… let me know.
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For more information about DDS, see Wikipedia: Digital Data Storage - Wikipedia
DAT and DDS (DDS1) are compatible so you can use DDS tapes in a DAT recorder and vice versa. Later types of DDS (DDS2, DDS3 etc) are not compatible because the head size was different to reduce the tape speed, if I recall correctly.
I expect that our mechanical expert @Jorn will probably look into the mechanical aspects of using DAT with a DCC recorder someday. We could either put DAT tape in a modified cassette shell, or modify a DAT mechanism to use a DCC head.
The reason why that will be useful is that DAT tapes are probably much easier to buy than DCC tapes and I suspect that the characteristics of the tape are probably compatible with DCC. I’m not sure how the exact tape widths compare but that’s probably just a mechanical problem that can be solved by tweaking the tape guides a little.
But DAT tapes are shorter than DCC tapes (90m max instead of 130m) so a DCC cassette loaded with DAT tape would have a shorter play time (max 60 minutes I think). So to make that useful, it would be a good idea to also work on the electronics (e.g. encode a tape with 4 tracks of 192kbps MP3 instead of 384kbps MP1).
===Jac
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Hi Jorn
Let me know how many tapes you need for testing I will send you
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Thank you for link very interesting
Jack you said that DCC bitrate is always 384 kbps
What about mp3 with same bitrate are they same in quality since DCC and mp3 are lossy compression
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Today I have measured the width of both tapes with a capliplar.
On mine it’s 4.0mm on both tapes.
So I order a 120min DAT tape, so I can put it in a Shell for some testing.
Note: length will be approx 41 min.
Keep you posted.
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Hi everyone
Today I was watching YT channel Anadialog
‘’Mystic new portable tape player “
But the most important information from this video is that Japanese company -Recoding the Masters -produce new tape ferric oxide -Fox-
and they will bring on market original Basf and Agfa formula for Reel to Reel tapes I think this is good news for DCC
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I measured the width of DCC tape with a digital caliper earlier this week. My measurement was 3.8 mm. Obviously it’s not easy to get an accurate reading on something like tape, because you can’t really pinch the head of the caliper against the edges…
Maybe it would be more accurate to do a direct comparison: unroll some tape from a DAT cassette and a DCC cassette and put one on top of the other to verify that they are the exact same widths?
===Jac
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I’m afraid Ferro tape is not going to be good enough for DCC. The magnetic coating in ferro tape is much harder to magnetize than chrome tape (the coercitivity is higher in ferro tape). And also, the resolution of ferro tape is not high enough to record the 96kHz per track signals.
By the way, I once went on a job interview at a tape duplication facility and got a tour of the place (I didn’t get the job). They showed me some machines that duplicated video tape at high speed by basically tightly pushing the chrome tape that goes into the video tape against a master tape made with ferro material and recorded as a mirror image in a special recorder. The tapes ran along a heated drum and the trick was that at the higher heat, the chrome tape lost almost all its coercitivity whereas the ferro tape wasn’t influenced. Pretty cool technology that made cheap rental video cassettes possible.
Chrome tape, as I understand it, can no longer be manufactured because the chemicals and the process cause too much pollution for current regulations.
===Jac
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@Jac, will do!
Hello
Yes I realize that type one tape is not what we looking for but I’m happy that this Japanese company see opportunity and start new business if we create demand then surely someone will be interested in production of DCC tapes with new design new compositions non magnetic compounds maybe polimeric who knows
But we can go different way and go tapeless some fake tape with flash memory stick inside cassette
Or extra bord inside player with hard drive ssd drive with sata connection 1 or 2 tb memory and there is no need of any cassette
But this would not be DCC anymore.
I agree. But we have to face the fact that one day, it will be too difficult to get DCC tapes, or anything that can be reliably converted to DCC. Not to mention, the heads are going to become more and more difficult to find too.
The good news is that changing a DCC recorder into a sort of music library where all the music and other data (table of contents and ITTS data) can be copied from tape to an SD card or hard disk is technically not very difficult, and is one of the goals of my DCC-i project. It will take some time to get done though.
=== Jac
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Jack I agree 100% with you some modification don’t destroy DCC player
Digital camera is still camera
Hybrid car is a car
This new DCC May be dcc version 2.0
Dear All,
Pictures above, they are telling the story!
After putting the DAT tape in the ACC with the DCC holes.
I can say the after multible test, I had ZERO result.
Even with the original filt pad, with no beeping sound.
So for now, TDK DAT doen’t work with DCC 
Greeting Jorn.
To the next test.
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It was worth a try.
We will find the right tape!
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